Services

Local News

Father demands answers after son is found by road in Benfleet

Report this comment

Fields marked with * are mandatory.

"

John T Pharro wrote:

Lefty Cyclist Type wrote:

Dan_ wrote:
This is unbelievable! This poor man. How on earth in the year 2012 can we be in a situation where an unexplained death is not being investigated properly, immediately, and with proper resources?? Outrageous. If ever there were things for echo readers to get behind, this is one of them.
Essex police website front page;
Robbery at lakeside, gadget to curb exhaust noise from cars?????....a 22 year old died and nobody knows why? PRIORITIES!!!

Firstly my sincerest condolences to Alex Fryer's family and friends at this terrible time. I hope the police get their finger out and start giving this case the attention it deserves, and give you the peace of closure.

Secondly, to answer Dan's questions, as someone who has campaigned for better road safety and more appropriate penalties for those who cause road deaths, it is my opinion that the law in the UK gives little more priority to people killed on roads than it does to animal roadkill.

Kill someone with a knife or a gun you'll get properly tried and sentenced. Kill someone with a motor vehicle and you'll get a small fine, perhaps points on a licence, or a ban. Only in very extreme circumstances are people jailed for killing on UK roads.

Also, the police simply do not take knocked-down cyclists seriously, and almost always trot out a 'not enough evidence' line if a complaint is made. This is why so many cyclists now wear helmet cameras or fit cameras to their bikes.

Of course my sympathy is with the family, but is it not members of this family who are campaigning for helmets for cyclist to be made compulsory?
I agree with everything you say, but why cyclist do not wear helmets is beyond me. I was told that helmets were provide free to post workers who cycle, but none of them would wear one. In fact I was told they had to sign to say if they were injured it was their own responsibility.
If that is true then don't you think helmets should be made compulsary?
I have first hand experience of a helmets effectiveness my nephew still keeps the crushed helmet that saved his life.

Helmets are only designed to survive an impact equivalent of an adult falling to the ground from a stationary standing position. A polystyrene hat will do very little if anything when a couple of tons of fast moving metal hits a person. It won't stop massive internal injury, it won't stop broken limbs and ruptured arteries, it won't stop crushed ribcages or punctured lungs etc.
The gold standard for cycle helmets is the Snell B90a standard. That ensures a helmet will survive an impact of "100J for all testing regardless of headform size or weight. Given an ideal frictionless mechanical test facility, this impact energy represents a 2.2+ meter drop of 5 kg"

You can read the standard for yourself here:

http://www.smf.org/s
tandards/b/b90astd

The sections you're looking for are E 4.3 and E 4.4.

Add to that the fact that helmet compulsion actually makes cycling more dangerous. The reason for this is that compulsory helmet law reduces the amount of people who cycle by about 85%.
That means there are fewer cyclists on the roads, fewer people who cycle and drive, and so much less public awareness of cyclists.

Helmet compulsion also puts a much larger burden on a nations health costs. This is because it discourages people from cycling so obesity, and cardio-
vascular disease - and their associated costs to society - increase.

The evidence for all this is already proven. In the 1990s Australia introduced cycle helmet compulsion. Overnight 95% of children who cycled to school stopped doing so. Instead their parents drove them. Now Australia is suffering an obesity epidemic and they are proposing to scrap the cycle helmet compulsion law.

In contrast, there is no helmet compulsion law in the Netherlands and Denmark, almost everyone cycles, they have extremely low rates of obesity and cardio-vascular disease, and they are the two safest countries in the world in which to cycle.

So to answer your question, no I don't think helmets should be made compulsory. They should remain a choice, because helmet compulsion would only result in more deaths, either on the roads or from obesity and cardio-vascular disease."

Your name

Your email

Reason

Please note we will not accept reports with HTML tags or URLs in them.

Ipsoregulated

This website and associated newspapers adhere to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice. If you have a complaint about the editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then please contact the editor here. If you are dissatisfied with the response provided you can contact IPSO here